Storytelling Earth and Body

Abstract

According to Sylvia Wynter, we are “a storytelling species”: The capacity to narrate the world might be what we hold most in common as “humans” across diverse geographies. In this article, we weave together Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminist scholarship to ask this question: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorization, help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural understandings of our relations with earth? We closely read three anticolonial (feminist) scholars whose theories illuminate the relationship of race, gender, and nature: Wynter’s genealogy of humans as storytellers; Lorena Cabnal’s elaboration of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and ancestral patriarchy; and Mishuana Goeman’s conceptualization of the body as a meeting place. Anticolonial feminist storytelling alters the spatiotemporal scales through which planetary crises are understood by centering the relationship between body and land. We elaborate how the White, cis male, bourgeois and propertied figure of the human reproduces a story that normalizes the racialization of people and ecologies, gendered domination, and extractivism. Revealing this dominant story to be a fiction of modernity, these scholars open a space of possibility, to tell stories otherwise that reimagine what it means to be human on earth. Storytelling as anticolonial praxis troubles the fixity of racial-colonial violence and reconceives the human, not as a liberal subject or fixed object within colonial capitalism, but as a node within a relational network of human and nonhuman kin.

Sylvia Wynter认为, 人类是“叙事的物种”。叙述世界的能力可能是我们做为“人类”在不同地域的最大共同点。在本文中, 我们融合黑人、原住民、第三世界和有色女性女权主义研究, 提出这样一个问题：作为理论化的一种替代模式, 在悠久的人地关系历史中和对人地关系的多元理解中, 叙事如何再现现今的地球危机？我们仔细解读了三位反殖民主义（女权主义）学者的关于种族、性别和自然三者关系的理论, 包括Sylvia Wynter的人类叙事传统, Lorena Cabnal的身体领地和父权制, Mishuana Goeman的将身体概念化为会议场所。反殖民女权主义者的故事改变了时空尺度, 从而使得我们从身体和土地关系角度去理解地球危机。我们详细阐述了人类的白人、顺性男、资产阶级和财产等形象如何再现了这样一个故事：人类和生态的种族化、性别化的统治和榨取主义被正常化。这些学者们揭示了该主流故事是关于现代性的一个虚构故事, 开创了一个关于可能性的空间, 讲述了一个重新想象它对人类含义的故事。叙事是反殖民行为, 它动摇了种族殖民暴力的固定性。叙事并非将人类重新视为殖民资本主义中的自由主体或固定对象, 而是将人类视为人类和非人类关系网络中的节点。

De acuerdo con Sylvia Wynter, somos una “especie narradora de historias”. La capacidad de narrar el mundo podría ser lo que más tenemos en común como “humanos” en diversas geografías. En este artículo, entretejemos la erudición feminista sobre los negros, los indígenas, y el tercer mundo y las mujeres de color, para formular esta pregunta: ¿Cómo puede la narración de historias, como modo alternativo de teorización, ayudarnos a resituar las crisis planetarias contemporáneas dentro de las historias más largas y las comprensiones plurales de nuestras relaciones con la tierra? Leemos con gran atención a tres estudiosas (feministas) anticolonialistas cuyas teorías iluminan la relación de raza, género y naturaleza: La genealogía de los humanos como narradores de historias, de Wynter; la elaboración del cuerpo-territorio y el patriarcado ancestral, de Lorena Cabnal; y la conceptualización del cuerpo como un lugar de encuentro, de Mishuana Goeman. La narración feminista anticolonialista altera las escalas espaciotemporales a través de las cuales se entienden las crisis planetarias centrando la relación entre el cuerpo y la tierra. Elaboramos sobre cómo la figura cis masculina, burguesa y propietaria de lo humano, reproduce una historia que torna normal la racialización de las personas y de las ecologías, el dominio del género y el extractivismo. Al revelar que esta historia dominante es una ficción de la modernidad, estas estudiosas abren un espacio de posibilidad, para narrar historias de otro modo destinadas a reimaginar lo que significa ser humano en la tierra. La narración de historias como praxis anticolonialista cuestiona la fijación de la violencia racial–colonial y vuelve a concebir lo humano, no como un sujeto liberal o como objeto fijo dentro del capitalismo colonial, sino como un nodo dentro de una red relacional de parientes humanos y no humanos.

Key Words:

• anticolonial feminism
• colonization
• heteropatriarchy
• racism
• relationality

关键词：:

• 反殖民女权主义
• 殖民
• 异构父权制
• 种族主义
• 关系性。

Palabras clave:

• colonización
• feminismo anticolonialista
• heteropatriarcado
• racismo
• relacionalidad

This article is a condensation of an ongoing dialogue that began with our session at the American Studies Association Conference on Kanaka Maoli land in November 2019, and the stories we shared from our lived geographies while visiting the sacred earth of the Kawainui restoration project.¹ Guided through the wetlands by our host Mr. Lehuakona Isaacs, we learned about the best woods for carving calabashes and tying rope, about ancestral ecological management practices of mixing saltwater and freshwater that made fish more abundant, and about the decades of work reviving and teaching cultural practices to Kanaka Maoli youth. As we visited plants, rock formations, marshes, and hill peaks, learning about the layers of conquest and resistance that shaped this place, we shared our own stories—about plants we use for cooking and remedies, how we pay tribute when visiting sacred places, and our respective connections to, or alienation from, our ancestral lands and homes. A dialogical space emerged that day from learning from Mr. Isaacs about the web of relations that care for and protect the Kawainui wetlands, and reverberated in subsequent conversations on how storytelling has been central to our work.

We write this article from our experiences as four geographers whose lives have been shaped by distinct stories of domination and resistance, and from our shared commitment to scholarship as anticolonial praxis.

• Pavithra: I experience racism and sexism as a queer nonbinary brown immigrant/settler in the United States. However, my dominant-caste (Brahmin) origins in India grant me generational cultural and material privilege. Learning from movement elders, I orient my work toward solidarity and collective care.

• Magie: As a cis Chicana woman, I navigate the generational loss of colonialism and assimilation by sitting with family relations and archives in Mexico and by building with kin who seek to imagine the world otherwise.

• Yolanda: As a cis Purépecha Indigenous descendant woman who has witnessed and experienced displacement, bordering, racism, and labor exploitation alongside my wise rural communities in Mexico and the United States, my work is driven by my communities’ knowledge and practices of relational care, communal solidarity, celebrations of life, and rituals of death in the midst of state-sponsored, multilayered violence across borders.

• Michelle: As a cis Mushkegowuk woman who has genealogical roots in the muskegs of so-called northern Ontario, Canada, my family’s life and relationships have been shaped by colonial genocide, but my commitment to anticolonial futures is grounded in how I have learned from my relatives, particularly Mushkegowuk, Anishinaabe, and Oji-Cree kin who have cared for me and who endlessly (re)make life in and beyond the muskegs.

Storytelling is how people make sense of the world and our place in it, an iterative process of interpreting reality through observation and the exchange of ideas. Storytelling, as a means of theorizing the structural from embodied experience, is a fundamental methodological intervention of Indigenous, Black, and third world and women of color feminist traditions. As queer Chicana feminists Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981) wrote in This Bridge Called My Back, “a theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” (23). Such explanatory frameworks, which emerge from living at the intersections of multiple oppressions, are a form of theory, yet these theories in the flesh are often unrecognized and devalued by colonial knowledge systems. As Black feminist Christian (1988) wrote:

People of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create … how else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity? And women, at least the women I grew up around, continuously speculated about the nature of life through pithy language that unmasked the power relations of their world. (68)

Christian described storytelling as a mode of theorization women of color employ to contest oppressive structures and imagine the world otherwise. Unlike Western scholarly conventions that atomize knowledge and segregate theory from praxis (C. Smith, Davies, and Gomes 2021), storytelling embraces the complexities and contradictions of lived experience, generating grammars at once prosaic and revelatory, textured by everyday realities even as they speculate about “the nature of life.” In crafting meaning from lived experience, anticolonial feminisms create an imaginative space of “survival with spiritedness,” in Christian’s words. As Tanana Athabascan theorist Million (2014) wrote, “stories, unlike data, contain the affective legacy of our experiences. They are a felt knowledge that accumulates and becomes a force that empowers stories that are otherwise separate to become a focus, a potential for movement” (31–32).

Storytelling is what sustains us as scholars and as people. Stories are how we have received “felt knowledges” from elders and community members, and how we interpret the affective layers of violence, resistance, and creativity that shape the places to which we are connected. The stories we carry give our work purpose as we strive to share knowledge in and beyond academic spaces. We bring these knowledges together hoping that they might, as Million suggested, animate movement. This article emerges from a collective learning process: of engaging “theory” in informal conversations as we listened deeply to one another’s stories about our lives and work (Kohl and McCutcheon 2015); of sitting with the tensions and expansions enabled by thinking across lived geographies and disciplines; and of holding the desire for liberation and the feeling of possibility close as we bear witness to violence. Reflecting on her extended conversations with Sylvia Wynter, McKittrick (2021) wrote:

The question of stories and storytelling illuminate the method of collaboration I learned from working with her. I learned from her that sharing stories engenders creative rigorous radical theory. Wait. I learned from her that sharing stories is critical rigorous radical theory. The act of sharing stories is the theory and the methodology. (73)

For us, too, storytelling is theory and methodology, the vessel that helps us navigate diverse streams of knowledge, and the compass that orients us through the ebbs and flows of study and struggle.

We began this piece asking ourselves this: How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of theorizing (McKittrick 2021), help us resituate contemporary planetary crises within longer histories and plural understandings of our relations with the earth? We find that Indigenous, Black, and third world feminisms alter the temporal and spatial scales through which planetary crises are understood by centering the relationship between body and land. We urge geographers to attend to these genealogies, and to recognize the significance of storytelling as spatial and embodied theorization.

Geography, as a field, is undergoing a reckoning. This piece engages those contending with the erasure of our genealogies from political ecology (Daigle 2018; Reese 2018; Whetung 2019; Freshour and Williams 2020;Farrales et al. 2021; Moulton et al. 2021; C. Smith, Davies, and Gomes 2021; Van Sant, Milligan, and Mollett 2021; Hunt 2022 ), political economy (Fabris 2017; Bledsoe and Wright 2019; Courtheyn 2019; Palmer 2020; Ramirez 2020; P. Vasudevan and Smith 2020; Purifoy and Seamster 2021; Al-Bulushi 2022; Bledsoe, McCreary, and Wright 2022; Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2022; Ferreira 2022), and geography more broadly (Eaves 2017; De Leeuw and Hunt 2018; Hawthorne and Heitz 2018; Naylor et al. 2018; Faria et al. 2019; Curley and Smith 2020; Bruno and Faiver-Serna 2022; Noxolo 2022 ). Underlying this scholarship is a collective understanding that contemporary ecological crises, including climate change, originate in the entangled histories of colonial genocide, enslavement, and White supremacy that are foundational to modernity. Wynter’s body of work articulates these histories as the “origin stories” (Yusoff 2018) of the era commonly known as the Anthropocene, better understood as the Plantationocene for its reproduction of the plantation form and its racial-colonial logics (Davis et al. 2019). In this article, we contribute to feminist geographic scholarship examining the relationships between bodily and ecological violence and resistance (Hunt 2015; Doshi 2017; Berman‐Arévalo and Ojeda 2020; Mollett 2021; P. Vasudevan 2021; Zaragocin and Caretta 2021), while echoing the caution of Indigenous and Black feminists who critique “damage-centered” narratives (Tuck 2009) and “biocentric logics” (McKittrick 2021) that fetishize and normalize corporeal harm.

Geography’s reckoning is also a resurgence, emerging alongside Indigenous struggles to protect land relations; abolition movements linking state violence to environmental racism’s slow violence; and queer, trans and crip-led movements centered on care, kinship and transformative justice. Storytelling, as we understand it, is a fertile ground of struggle. By stories, we refer to commonsense narratives explaining how the world works, based in collectively held (and competing) historical memories, with material consequences for world building. Storytelling describes how colonial metanarratives become imprinted in our minds through images and material representations of progress, implying a persistent lack of modernity (Said 1979) for nations of the Global South competing to “modernize” their societies. Storytelling also describes vernacular explanations of structural oppression that lay the groundwork for transformative agendas, a mode of “practical vision” linking desire and pragmatic politics (Million 2014, 35). Through narrating personal experiences, queer and trans diasporas enable “mobile sites of belonging” across incongruent and seemingly distant geographies (Hsu 2022, 4). In scholarship, storytelling functions as “translational praxis,” moving between the word, the work and the world, to reframe academic expertise as “a conduit, a passage, through which the stories of a breathing, throbbing world peopled by our saathis² are received” (Nagar 2019, 19).

We assert an anticolonial lineage to inspire a paradigm shift in geography alongside the saathis and elders we cite. Storytelling as anticolonial praxis draws on lived experiences and community practices to generate explanatory frameworks (L. B. Simpson 2017). To tell stories is to weave theory. Anticolonial storytelling reveals that otherwise imaginaries are not located in distant futures or abstract theories, but emergent from within the longue durée of planetary disaster (Cacopardo 2018; Sheller 2018; LaDuke and Cowen 2020). Environmental justice stories, for example, “bring a mythological and literary vision to ‘seeing’ the apocalyptic and dystopic in seemingly mundane everyday human-environment relations of toxic landscapes” (Houston and Vasudevan 2017, 246). Racialized and gendered communal life “is the creative text” (McKittrick 2021, 51) of embodied and place-based resistance, expressed in oral traditions, cultural forms, and everyday practices that sustain fugitivity (C. Smith, Davies, and Gomes 2021; Mosquera Muriel 2022).

Rather than conduct a genealogical review, in what follows we closely read³ Sylvia Wynter, Mishuana Goeman, and Lorena Cabnal, three anticolonial feminist scholars whose theories explain structural oppression as a dominant story that shapes embodied experience in racialized and gendered terms.⁴ Aware of traversing diverse anticolonial and feminist traditions, we read each thinker on their own terms first, and then marked places of convergence and departure in their frameworks. In doing so, we perform a theoretical “shoaling” (King 2019), seeking to bridge the disciplinary and racial chasms resulting from Western subjugation of anticolonial knowledges (Curley et al. 2022). King (2019) conceptualized the shoal as “a material, constructed, and imagined ecotonal space of becoming where ceremony is also geography” (72); echoing Audre Lorde, we wonder with King how we might “use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future” (72). In showing us how the stories we tell reproduce modernity’s racial-colonial fictions, they also open a space to tell stories otherwise, to reimagine what it means to be human on earth. We work through each thinker’s key ideas that illuminate the relationship between race, gender, and nature: Wynter’s intellectual genealogy of humans as a storytelling species, Cabnal’s elaboration of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and ancestral patriarchy, and Goeman’s conception of the body as a meeting place. For Caribbean novelist, playwright and intellectual polyglot Wynter, storytelling is what defines us as human. How we narrate our place in the world shapes our ways of knowing, being, and acting, and transforms our bodies and worlds materially. Cabnal, a Maya-Xinka philosopher and member of the Association of Xinka Indigenous Women from Santa MariaXalapán, Amismaxaj (Guatemala), explained the concept of cuerpo-territorio that emerges from dialogues occurring within and between Indigenous communitarian feminist groups across Abya Yala.⁵ Cabnal reframed violence against women and land in relational terms, as the enactment of heteropatriarchal origin and classification stories. Structural oppression is experienced and reproduced through the body, which Tonawanda Band of Seneca scholar Goeman explained as the meeting place, neither individual nor bounded, but interconnected with communal life, the social body of the colonial nation-state, and our ecological relations.

Putting Wynter, Cabnal and Goeman into conversation, we see how Black, Indigenous, and feminist of color storytelling genealogies and practices become forces of possibility, altering and disrupting the racial-colonial-heteropatriarchal manipulations of scale, space, land, and power that remain central in geographic scholarship. In the context of planetary apocalypse, storytelling can reanimate scholarship as an anticolonial practice grounded in wonder (McKittrick 2021). Stories express and enable certain forms of relations (and/or domination), which in turn generate our subjectivities, behaviors, and knowledges. We turn to storytelling to reimagine our collective sense of self through profound interconnection with one another and our nonhuman relations.

The Storytelling Human

I identify the Third Event in Fanonian-adapted terms as the origin of the human as a hybrid-auto-instituting-languaging-storytelling species: bios/mythoi.

—Wynter and McKittrick (2015, 25)

Wynter’s “rehistoricization of the human” (Mignolo 2015, 118) is both a species-level history of the human being and a history of Western modernity, nested origin stories by which a particular White, bourgeois, and male ideal, what Wynter called “Man,” came to define the human in universal terms.⁶ Wynter’s articulation of “Man” implies an intersectional understanding incorporating race, class, and gender in the construct of the human. These socially constructed axes materialize as roles we play, based on the stories we inherit. The dominant Western version of humanity positions women, poor, and non-White people as inferior, and reduces nonhuman life to resource for extraction, producing planetary crisis. By drawing attention to these “macro-origin stories’' (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 10), Wynter’s elaboration of humans as storytellers elucidates how such discourses proliferate a world rooted in domination rather than relation, and how we might undo them by telling stories otherwise.

According to Wynter, the basis of our shared humanness is our capacity for storytelling. She pointed to “the co-evolution of the human brain with … the emergent faculties of language, storytelling” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 25) as the third event in planetary history.⁷ This myth-making ability, and the attendant desire to locate humans within an ordered reality, marked a fundamental species-level transformation.⁸ Wynter postulated that we are physiologically oriented by our neurological development toward languaging existence; we create origin stories, which serve as templates for social organization, and in turn regulate our behavior. In other words, storytelling regulates us to act in accordance with our inherited cultural narratives, subsequently materializing as external realities through our actions in and upon the world. Thus, “the human is, metaDarwinianly, a hybrid being, both bios and logos (or, as I have recently come to redefine it, bios and mythoi)” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 16); we are both bios, biological beings, and mythoi, socially constructed by the codes that guide appropriate human action. Wynter’s hybrid (biological-storytelling) human being is a provocation to recognize that our commonsense understanding of the human as homo sapiens has, and is, a particular origin story. Wynter (2003) reconstructed an intellectual genealogy of the Western concept of the human, as outlined next.⁹

First, Wynter described how the paradigm shift of the Copernican Revolution, which decentered God and elevated the physical sciences, redefined the human as a political subject (homo politicus). Crucially, this figure of the human (“Man 1”) depended on the simultaneous racialization of people and nature. The “master code” (Wynter 2003, 278) of medieval Christian cosmology—dividing the heavens, the realm of Spirit, from the earth, the domain of fallen Flesh—was mapped onto the earth during colonization.¹⁰ Justifying imperialism on the basis of civilizational inferiority, Europe’s “temperate zones” were considered divinely redeemed, and non-European lands were imagined as “torrid zones” of inhabitability, submerged underwater in their “natural [fallen] place” (Wynter 2003, 279). When Columbus’s voyages proved the so-called New World to be inhabited, this cartographic imaginary of the non-Western world as a “space of Otherness” was transposed onto the bodies of colonized Indigenous and Black peoples, marking them as “irrational/subrational Human Others” (Wynter 2003, 281–82).

Wynter marked a second redefinition of the human (“Man 2”), with the rise of Darwinism and the natural sciences. Black and Indigenous peoples, considered sinful by nature according to the religious-racial order of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (see also Batalla 1996; Martínez 2008), came to be regarded “as biologically defective and damned (in the nineteenth century)” within the emergent teleology of evolution (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 143). Evolution plays a particularly insidious role in racial classification, functioning “as a half-scientific, half-mythic theory of origins” (Wynter 2003, 319) that naturalizes capitalist economics in purportedly objective truths. In the epistemic shift from human as political subject, homo politicus, to human as economic agent, homo oeconomicus, the consolidation of race as a biological fact became the justification for the inevitability of political economy.

This biological story of humanness is a racist script inherited from European modernity that reproduces colonial classifications of people as “naturally selected (i.e. eugenic) and naturally dysselected (i.e. dysgenic) beings” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 16). Malthus’s thesis of natural scarcity, for instance, scapegoated the growing masses of the poor, dispossessed by industrialization, suggesting that the only “cure” for the problem of human overpopulation was bourgeois economics, glossing eugenics in evolutionary terms. Such racist biocentric narratives are persistent and ubiquitous. The renewed invocation of Malthusian arguments in reference to climate change (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020), and representations of climate migrants from the Global South as racially inferior serve to obscure the racial capitalist regimes responsible for contemporary planetary crises (Ahuja 2021).

Wynter’s storytelling framework offers a mechanism for understanding how origin stories become a collective common sense, reproducing particular social-ecological formations (see also Escobar’s 2011 decolonial critique of development). The human, a palimpsest of colonialism’s civilizational and biological racial logics, is the mythoi that shapes our bodies, our life chances, and our environments in racially differential terms. We enact modernity’s mythoi across scales: at the bodily scale, in the norm of White corporeality;¹¹ in families, through the reproduction of heteropatriarchal norms;¹² through the state’s racially coded logics of citizenry, sovereignty, and human rights;¹³ and globally, in escalating extractivism despite capitalism’s undeniable unsustainability.¹⁴ This dominant story reproduces symbolic codes that equate Whiteness with humanness or life and Blackness (and Indigeneity, we believe) with inhumanness or death. Understanding how and why this “genre of the human” gains power is crucial because, as McKittrick explained, these underlying symbolic codes have been globalized and exported such that “the empirical and experiential lives of all humans are increasingly subordinated to a figure that thrives on accumulation” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 10).

We draw two key lessons from Wynter’s genealogy of the human that clarify the racial-colonial basis of environmental devastation. First, the eugenic classification of people, into those worthy of living and those expendable in service to capital, extends to the racialization of ecologies. Second, humanness defined in capitalist terms is a Western bourgeois story that rationalizes colonization and extractivism as necessary for human advancement. As we explore further with Cabnal and Goeman, this racialization was, and is, also a gendered process, normalizing violence against female and queer people’s bodies, and by extension, the land, depicted in feminized terms (as “virgin”). Wynter recognized gender as a crucial axis through which the sociogenic code becomes materialized in our bodies, particularly through familial roles that reproduce patriarchal origin stories (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 33).¹⁵ Wynter’s explanation of how stories become embodied, “alchemically made flesh” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 26–27), resonates with women of color theories in the flesh (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981) that Goeman developed further. As Black and Indigenous geographic scholars have argued, the devaluing of people as subhuman or inhuman is reinforced by the racialization and gendering of their lands as wastelands, empty space, degraded or blighted, requiring settler, White, modernist salvation (Nishime and Williams 2018; A. Davies 2021; Estes et al. 2021; Wright 2021).

Wynter’s storytelling framework destabilizes the intractability of racial-colonial capitalism by resituating it as (only) one possibility among many. If storytelling is the mechanism by which human societies reproduce autonomically, then it is also the lever for rupturing the unconscious reproduction of capitalism’s death drive. McKittrick (2021) urged us to recognize our collective investment in “our presently ecocidal and genocidal world as normal and unalterable. Our work is to notice this logic and breach it” (2). Wynter showed us that we can breach the system by reimagining who we are, in terms of who we are capable of being: homo narrans, the storytelling human, “a figure on the horizon, rooted in anticolonial struggle and thought” (Alagraa 2018, 164). By uncovering humans as storytellers, Wynter invited us to recognize that “humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 23). In place of modernity’s terrible scripts parading as objective reality, Wynter urged us, all of us, “whether white or nonwhite, black or nonblack [to be] cognitively empowered to,” quoting Frantz Fanon, “tear off with all [our] strength, the shameful livery put together by centuries of incomprehension” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 54). In Wynter’s invitation to redefine humanness as possibility, we see resonance with Cabnal’s vision of reinventing ourselves, in calling for women to recover their bodies as a first territory (cuerpo-territorio), and with Goeman’s understanding of the body as a meeting place, where colonial violences are reproduced, and can therefore be interrupted.

Cuerpo-Territorio/Body-Territory

Recognizing individual corporeality as one’s own unrepeatable territory allows for strengthening the sense of affirmation of one’s existence of being in the world. Thus, self-consciousness emerges, which provides an account of how this body has lived in its personal, particular, and temporal history, the different manifestations and expressions of patriarchies and all the oppressions arising from them.

—Cabnal (2010, 22)

Lorena Cabnal,¹⁶ alongside her collaborators in Amismaxaj, theorized the connections between colonial-capitalist extraction, patriarchy, and the embodied ways that Indigenous women experience the effects of these two oppressive structures. Cabnal’s theorizations of patriarchy, and her understanding of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory), entangle and stretch conceptions of land, body, and gender. Engaging Wynter’s storytelling framework as the mechanism through which humans reproduce social systems, in dialogue with Cabnal’s theorizations of patriarchy, animates a provocative understanding of how patriarchy is made, remade, and sustained through story(tellings). If, following Wynter, we are reproducing Western modernity’s colonial patriarchy, then Cabnal argued that there have been other stories of patriarchy that preceded European colonization, what she termed “ancestral patriarchy.”¹⁷ In this section we delve into Cabnal’s theorizations of ancestral patriarchy and cuerpo-territorio to better understand how communitarian feminist conceptions of the body–land relation reveal the ways that planetary crises are embodied, and how they need to be addressed.

In her writing, Cabnal reflected on the role of patriarchy in particular Indigenous cosmogonies, theories of the origins of the universe, from across Abya Yala. Cabnal (2010) analyzed the embodied consequences of the masculine–feminine binaries embedded in these origin stories, in discussing gendered social and natural roles. She wrote:

according to the designations of the heteronormative cosmogony, we Indigenous women assume the role of caretakers for our culture, protectors, reproducers, and ancestral guardians of an original patriarchy. In our bodies we reaffirm heterosexuality, compulsory maternity, and the ancestral masculine pact in which women, in a continuum, are tributaries for ancestral patriarchal supremacy. (19)

This “original ancestral patriarchy,” according to Cabnal, has existed for millennia; it predates European colonization, and, she argued, “the ancestral native patriarchy was refunctionalized with the penetration of the Western patriarchy” (Cabnal 2010, 15). Western patriarchy intensified uneven gender relations and introduced racial hierarchies and violence, she explained. Cabnal’s theorization of patriarchy as preexisting European colonial contact is key in her analysis of how Indigenous origin stories, used to justify patriarchal norms, are reinforced through dominant colonial stories. As such, she questioned the idea that gender itself was solely a colonial introduction, as per Lugones (2008) and others.

Reflecting on “cosmogonic ancestral paradigms” (Cabnal 2010, 16) arising from specific Indigenous cosmovisions, Cabnal asserted that origin stories and language are recounted to transmit ancestral principles of harmony and reciprocity. She critiqued these paradigms as being based on a “masculine cosmogonic construction” (Cabnal 2010, 18); for harmony to be achieved, she argued, women are expected to play a subordinate role to men and follow a particular heteronormative order. In this way, women’s bodies, our first territories, have been appropriated and exploited in a seemingly “natural” and logical order. Cabnal highlighted the role stories play in upholding ancestral patriarchy in Indigenous cosmogonies, as they imply that harmony and reciprocity can be achieved only when heteronormative gender binaries are upheld. Her exploration of the role of story in these ancestral paradigms harkens Wynter (2001), and how these cosmogonies serve as a “second set of instructions,” in which the stories humans tell of themselves become their “codes or masks or mythoi or origin narratives” (41).

Putting Cabnal’s and Wynter’s theorizations in conversation provokes another question: How might preconquest cosmogonies have also created narratives that reproduced other notions of being human, (perhaps) including a version of heteropatriarchal logics? Cabnal’s reliance on a gender binary in the text we engage with appears to perpetuate the erasure of trans, nonbinary, and Two-Spirit peoples; however, elsewhere (Schwartz 2014), Cabnal asserted Indigenous beliefs “in the pluridimensionality of our bodies,” and argued that the gender binary was reinforced by Western patriarchy. Segato, an Argentinian feminist scholar, suggested that in ancestral communal patriarchy, gender was understood as binary, but simultaneously existed as dual, plural, and fluid. As such, she called it, “low intensity communal patriarchy,” while she described Western patriarchy as being of “high intensity” due to its rigid imposition of gender binaries (Segato and Monque 2021). Although we remain unsettled by Cabnal’s gendered language in the text we read, we recognize the plurality of Indigenous cosmogonies and communal feminisms. Following Nishnaabeg scholar Whetung (2019), we recognize the (un)learning of gender conceptions as a continual part of our anticolonial praxis. We also see resonance in Cabnal’s theory of cosmogonic ancestral paradigms with Indigenous feminist and queer examinations of how Indigenous stories, including origin stories, are mobilized to uphold heteropatriarchal and essentialist gendered caretaking within Indigenous communities (L. B. Simpson 2017; Starblanket 2018; Wilson and Laing 2019; Byrd 2020).

Cabnal’s framework clarifies how land and body exist as relational sites of capitalist extraction. As Cabnal (2010) stated plainly, “to position ourselves in the analysis of our situation and condition as Indigenous women, we cannot start from partiality, but rather the comprehensive nature implied by this multi-dimensional patriarchy in our lives” (16). This multidimensional layering of patriarchy, according to Cabnal, must also be addressed by Indigenous feminists struggling against colonial-capitalist extraction across the continent. Cabnal (2010) argued that Indigenous women must regain corporeal power from this layered patriarchy: “recovering the body to defend it from the structural historical attack against it becomes an essential everyday struggle because patriarchies have disputed the body territory for millennia to ensure their survival based on and over women’s bodies” (22). This reference to “millennia” speaks to the ways that Indigenous women’s lives and bodies—as their/our first territory—are devalued by both the ancestral and colonial patriarchal structures they reside within in Abya Yala.

The revival of a land–body interrelation, according to Cabnal, is essential in struggling against colonial-capitalism and its extraction of life. She named this revivalist method cuerpo-territorio, calling for the recovery and protection of Indigenous women’s bodily territory. Cuerpo-territorio has been explored in depth by Zaragocin and Caretta (2021), who defined it as “the inseparable ontological relationship between body and territory” (1504) that has been used as a communitarian Indigenous feminist framework of theory and practice across Latin America. Cabnal (2010) saw cuerpo-territorio as “a feminist proposal that integrates our people’s historical and everyday struggle to recover the land-territory as the way of guaranteeing a concrete territorial space, where the lives of bodies are materialized” (22–23). For Cabnal, the struggle against corporate capitalist extraction is not solely about ensuring that future generations continue to have relations with the nonhuman world to live a dignified life. Cuerpo-territorio also enables an understanding of the interconnection between extractivism of the land and violence beget on women’s bodies, and the need to address their intersections. As she wrote, “historical and oppressive violences exist both for my first territory, my body, as well as for my historic territory, the land. In that sense, all the forms of violence against women are attacks against that existence that should be whole and full” (Cabnal 2010, 23). Cabnal insisted that Indigenous women’s bodies are profoundly connected to the land; colonial-capitalist violence and extractivism go hand in hand with patriarchal violence against women. Therefore, to reclaim the body, and subvert colonial heteropatriarchal logics requires resisting and reimagining patriarchal cosmogonies that extend beyond the colonial-capitalist structure. Indigenous struggles to protect land and waters are intimately linked to struggles against gendered violence and heteropatriarchy, and these in turn are intimately related to the current moment of planetary crises. To call for an end to the capitalist resource extraction exacerbating climate disaster, we must simultaneously call for an end to gendered violence.

Whereas Wynter’s meta-origin story is the colonial narrative that centers man-as-human, for Cabnal, origin stories predating colonial conquest also carry patriarchal logics that require dismantling. Cabnal suggested that cuerpo-territorio can rewrite ancestral patriarchy, offering alternate imaginings of how to live in better relation with nonhuman life. By reclaiming one’s own body–land relation, Cabnal (2010) wrote:

I take on the recuperation of my expropriated body to generate life, happiness, vitality, pleasures, and to construct liberating knowledges for making decisions. I bring this power together with the defense of my land territory, because I cannot conceive of this woman’s body without a space on the land that dignifies my existence and promotes life in its fullness. (23)

Therefore, cuerpo-territorio enables envisioning a richer existence for humanity and the land, refusing colonial notions of scale that separate the body and the land as distinct entities. Cuerpo-territorio serves as a spatial methodology in which “the body is the first unit of spatial analysis, specifically as related to gender-based violence and territorial struggles” (R. Vasudevan 2022, 6), offering potential pathways for addressing the twinned social and ecological dimensions of planetary crises. Cabnal’s formulation of cuerpo-territorio parallels Goeman’s writings on colonialism, gender, and scale, as we explore next, discussing Goeman’s theorization of the body as a meeting place.

Body as a Meeting Place

The bodies of Native women are dangerous because they produce knowledge and demand accountability, whether at the scale of their individual bodily integrity of their communities’ ability to remain on their bodies of land and water, or as citizens of their nations. The sites of these “meeting places” and scales of geographies are key to contesting colonial structures that limit spatial alternatives and thus continue to create spatial injustices.

—Goeman (2017, 123)

Writing from the standpoint of Indigenous life in the colonial contexts of Canada and the United States, Goeman theorized land–body interrelations through Indigenous women’s embodied geographies. Similar to Cabnal, she is committed to recuperating Indigenous women’s bodies as sites of memory, struggle, and healing that disrupt gendered and sexualized processes of colonization, in addition to showing “how that body’s experience in the world becomes an important ontological origin” (Goeman 2017, 102). According to Goeman, Indigenous feminist practices restory our/their existence by linking Indigenous bodies to a web of relations that extend vertically, to past and future generations, and horizontally, to bodies of land, water, and nonhuman life. In this way, Goeman powerfully expanded Western conceptions of scale, with the human body as a central node. Engaging Goeman in dialogue with Wynter and Cabnal, we see how Indigenous feminist praxis creates a paradigmatic shift in how we understand humanness, as the life of one human body is intimately connected with other humans, nonhumans, and land. This rendering, in counterpoint to colonial notions of humanness as individual or private beings, illuminates an ontological reality that sharpens our understandings of conquest and resistance. As Goeman (2017) argued, understanding “the body as a meeting place” (112) grounds the human in Indigenous and anticolonial forms of relationality, breaching and exceeding colonial stories and constructions of existence. We explore how Goeman’s work draws on Indigenous, Black, and third world and women of color traditions to examine the spatiotemporal scales of planetary crises as they are experienced and lived by Indigenous women.

Goeman’s conception of “the meeting place” arises from her careful reading of Hogan’s (1997) novel Solar Storms, which follows three generations of Indigenous women in the Wing family in a border town between Canada and the United States. Her multilayered analysis of the meeting place is, in part, aimed toward understanding how Indigenous relationalities become erased through colonial processes premised on scales of difference that fix Indigenous bodies and lands vertically in colonial temporalities, and horizontally through human and nonhuman binaries. As Goeman (2017) stated, colonial power relies on dominant discourses that construct a reality premised on “body-contained and land-contained entities” (101), including Indigenous discourses affected by colonial notions of time and space. In contrast, Indigenous feminist practices uproot colonial logics of containment by illuminating the interconnections between colonial capitalist extraction on Indigenous lands, and gendered and sexualized violence embodied by Indigenous women and girls across multiple generations. Whereas Cabnal’s analysis focuses on dominant stories of gender and sexuality originating in ancestral patriarchy, Goeman directed our attention to how colonial domination is naturalized and erased through gendered and sexualized discourses of Indigenous women and lands. Echoing Cabnal, and Indigenous feminist and queer thinkers, organizers, and caretakers across Turtle Island¹⁸ (Million 2013; Cáceres 2015; Hunt 2015; A. Simpson 2016; Stark 2016; Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network 2016; L. B. Simpson 2017; Cacopardo 2018; Zaragocin 2019), Goeman (2017) examined how the expendability of Indigenous women’s lives has been historically intertwined with the expendability of Indigenous lands, as “in the conquering of precolonial America, the land was often depicted as female or virgin territory waiting to be fertilized and inscribed in European encounters” (113). Although Goeman focused on the experiences of cis Indigenous women and girls, we believe that her thinking can be brought into constructive dialogue with anticolonial queer theorists who analyze gender and sexuality as structuring principles of colonial conquest and racial capitalism, and unearth the silences and erasures reproduced in a masculinist heteronormativity that pervades anticolonial theory and organizing (including anticolonial feminisms; Ferguson 2004; Snorton and Haritaworn 2013; Haley 2016; Hunt 2018; Wilson and Laing 2019; Byrd 2020).

Examining the ways that gendered and sexualized violence expand across vertical and horizontal scales, Goeman (2017) attended to how the individual bodies of the Wing women are intimately connected to “multiple generations of stories and journeys through temporalities and spaces” (100). Goeman was interested in how Indigenous women’s bodies are always already relational, as they are intimately connected to the social body of Indigenous communities, which are entangled with national bodies of colonial states, while being intimately connected to bodies of land and nonhuman relations that shape Indigenous societies. As Goeman (2017) observed, Hogan’s storytelling asserts a scale of connectivity as “bodies and lands become conduits of connection rather than impermeable entities, … thus collapsing the settler scale that separates humans, lands, animals, and so on” (101). Although Goeman (2017) attended to how scale can be constructed as a mode of exclusion and containment, she was ultimately committed to understanding how an Indigenous politics of scale “becomes a weapon of expansion and inclusion, a means of enlarging identities” (115). As she explained, Hogan’s scale of connectivity bears resemblance to Massey’s conception of place; both thinkers conceptualize place—in this case that of the body—as relationally connected across time and space and thus “can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (Goeman 2017, 112).

As Goeman wrote, a relational conception of the body is crucial in understanding intergenerational violence as it disrupts neoliberal approaches predicated on linear historical narratives that fix trauma, marking people as degenerative, and the transmission of trauma as inevitable. According to these dominant understandings of trauma, Indigenous peoples become “trapped in their victimization, genetically inheriting pain”(Goeman 2017, 118). In contrast, the body conceived as “meeting place” elucidates the colonial constructions of Indigenous bodies that “make women’s lives expendable” (118). Returning to Wynter, we begin to see how the “meeting place,” as poignantly depicted in Hogan’s novel, helps us understand how “the second set of instructions” (i.e., colonial narratives about Indigenous existence) become actualized. As Goeman detailed, dominant discursive practices undergirding colonial conquest are made material through the codification of gendered colonial laws, land theft, and interpersonal and sexualized violence. Goeman reminded us that inherited understandings of Indigenous peoples and lands become embedded in neoliberal approaches to repair and healing that divorce individual humans, lands, and waters from each other, and from the structural conditions that shape their interconnected existence. Thus, colonial stories of Indigenous peoples and lands are made material through modes of colonial domination, including everyday societal actions, becoming realities that are lived and felt by Indigenous peoples and lands across generational and spatial scales.

Drawing on Chicana feminist Moraga and Anzaldúa’s (1981) theory in the flesh, Goeman reflected on how the meeting place recalls the historical production of Indigenous women’s bodies, in how they become physically marked and scarred by colonial violence, and yet, how they continually resist and (re)make their lives within these structural conditions. As Goeman (2017) stated, “theories of the flesh address history at the level of materiality of the body” (111) through a narration that refuses colonial renderings of Indigenous peoples as inherently deteriorating subjects. Stories or theories of the flesh elucidate Indigenous women’s experiences of colonial violence by storying these scars to “undermine the erasure of this violence and posit these scars and embodiments as Native women’s resilience, healing, and alternative conception of history and futurity” (Goeman 2017, 114). Goeman’s reading of scars as markers of both violence and healing attends to Indigenous feminist storytelling practices that shape Indigenous women’s self-consciousness by affirming how their existence is simultaneously shaped by colonial conquest and Indigenous forms of relationality. Goeman’s meeting place parallels Wynter’s explanation of storytelling as both a mode of domination, as colonial explanatory frameworks are made material through practices of extractive violence, and a mode of disruption and reimagination, renarrating the world otherwise.

Through Goeman’s reading of Hogan’s creative text, we begin to understand how Indigenous women’s bodies are a meeting place, not only because they are sites of “open wounds that embody the mental and physical destruction of colonization” (Goeman 2017, 108), but because they are a site of struggle, or “a battleground” (188), where healing occurs through collective memory, and a refusal of colonial amnesia and denial. As Goeman (2017) powerfully wrote, the women protagonists in Hogan’s novel “stand for a meeting place between life and death, a space of in-between and of body as a memory jogger not only of fear, but also of loss and the need for ongoing resistance” (117). Through the meeting place, we begin to see how Indigenous women’s stories remap their bodies through a spatiotemporal connectivity that animates another way of being human, one that is shaped by all bodies of Indigenous and anticolonial life.

Conclusion

In bringing Black, Indigenous, and third world and women of color feminists into dialogue, we begin to understand how racial-colonial-heteropatriarchal meta-origin stories structure our lived realities, and how anticolonial storytelling can remake the world. Story, in these traditions, is an extension of the body. As Anzaldúa (2015) wrote: “writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not on incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities. The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought. The body is a text” (5). Alexander (2006) reminded us that theorizing from the embodied experience of gendered and racial oppression is not mere description; storytelling is a sacred and transformative practice that seeks “to transmute this body and the pain of its dismemberment to a remembering of the body to its existential purpose” (329). In this article, we engage Cabnal, Goeman, and Wynter to describe how bodies (human and not) are texts, how storytelling is and makes theory, and how the human can be reimagined. Storytelling, in Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminist genealogies, reveals alternate renderings of body–land relations, refusing Western colonial dichotomies. Such practices are powerful tools; they reveal not only the storied origins of planetary crises in racial-colonial modernity, but the fundamental interdependence of life (Sharma 2015).

As Nishnaabeg scholar L.B. Simpson (2017) articulated, Indigenous stories-as-theory are continually regenerated through contextual embodied practices. Our bodies are sites of knowledge and possibility, nodes within a web of intimate connections with other humans, nonhumans and land that shape “a radical alternative present” (9). Cabnal and Goeman made these radical alternatives present by rethinking the human through the land–body interrelation, conceived respectively as cuerpo-territorio and the meeting place. These ontological realities, founded on Indigenous and anticolonial relations, have always existed and endure in spite of colonial conquest. As Cabnal (2010) wrote, the practice of cuerpo-territorio recuperates the “corporeal cosmic memory” (22) of ancestral knowledges that are held and interpreted in and by the body. For Cabnal and Goeman, the body is both a site and source of memory, knowledge, healing, and resistance, connected to humans and nonhumans through scales of connectivity that disrupt colonial logics. These generative offerings provide paths forward in the moment of planetary crises in which we are living; we must dismantle the dominant story and proliferate stories that tell otherwise if we are to survive and thrive.

Wynter (1995) regarded humans as “magical beings,” because we are both bios and mythoi: “Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities” (35). The stories we tell enact material realities that can create worlds otherwise, by casting off the inherited masks or mythoi of a racial-colonial existence. The realization of our existence is a practice and process, according to Wynter, of becoming (more, more than) human. Black feminist poet-philosopher Gumbs (2019) read Wynter’s work as an invitation into “an unlearning and a new poetics conducive not to individuality, colonial kinship, reification of an idea of the human across time, but to life” (342). For Gumbs, praxis is creative attunement, finding kinship in the poetics of life underwater. She recognized resonances with our species in the history of cyanobacteria that once “made the world unbreathable for most of the organisms on the planet other than themselves” (Gumbs 2019, 343), and read for “the collectivity of coral (corals) [which] exceeds the language” (340). The storytelling human that we are or could be is a relational and alterable being who seeks connections, a recognition apart from liberal politics (Tuck and Walcott 2017; King 2019) that moves beyond a (mono-)humanistic understanding of the world (Gergan 2015; Yazzie and Baldy 2018; Yazzie 2019). Reading across Wynter, Cabnal, and Goeman, we begin to understand how storytelling, emergent from the intelligence of land–body relations, could serve as a foundational method for building a relational liberation (Maynard and Simpson 2022).

As L. B. Simpson (2011) reminded us:

storytelling is at its core decolonizing, because it is a process of remembering, visioning and creating a just reality. Storytelling then becomes a lens through which we can envision our way out of cognitive imperialism, where we can create models and mirrors where none existed, and where we can experience the spaces of freedom and justice.

Storytelling is a fundamental practice of imagining the world otherwise. To survive and rebuild as “we drift as a species toward an unparalleled catastrophe” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 18), we must rethink our place in the world and how we envision the societies we collectively build. Weaving stories through the grammars and practices offered by these anticolonial feminist genealogies, we must animate our imaginations to lead us out of the Man-as-Human toward homo narrans, the storytelling human (Alagraa 2018); we must embrace the expansive relationalities that make us already more than human.

We close this offering with the words and life memory of Lenca Indigenous leader Berta Cáceres,¹⁹ whose acceptance speech at the 2015 Goldman Awards posed a powerful call to action. Cáceres began by sharing that in her people’s worldview, they are deeply interconnected with earth, water, and corn, and have a duty to protect the rivers who protect them in turn. Then she urged:

Let’s wake up! Let’s wake up humankind! We are out of time! Our conscience will be shaken as we contemplate the auto-destruction based on [our current] racist, patriarchal, depredatory capitalist [system]. … Our mother earth—militarized, fenced, and poisoned, where basic rights are systematically violated—demands that we take action … . Let’s build societies that are able to coexist in a fair, dignified way, and for life. Let’s come together and remain hopeful that we defend and care for the blood of this earth and its spirits.

Imagining the world otherwise, as Cáceres reminded us, requires us to refuse those dominant stories that sustain our depredatory economic system, a system that empowers those who qualify as “human” and in turn a system they seek to protect at any cost. We acknowledge with care and grief that mobilizing these radical alternate presents can be a matter of life and death (Daigle and Dorries forthcoming). The following year, in March 2016, Cáceres was murdered. Her death has fueled further organizing, as many believe that Cáceres lives: Her spirit continues to call on us to protect the lifeblood and spirits of this earth.

Acknowledgments

We are deeply grateful to Charles Lehuakona Isaacs for his generosity. We would like to thank Liz Mason-Deese for translating Lorena Cabnal’s essay for us; Pradhitha Boppana for checking our references; and the reviewers and editors of the special issue for their time and constructive feedback. We also extend our gratitude to Sylvia Wynter, Lorena Cabnal, and Mishuana Goeman, as their brilliance guided the formation of this article. Finally, we are grateful for one another, for the support and friendship that shaped the slow and intentional pace of our collaborative reading and writing process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pavithra Vasudevan

PAVITHRA VASUDEVAN is an Assistant Professor in African & African Diaspora Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail: [email protected]. Her/their research addresses toxicity as a manifestation of racial violence, capitalist entanglements with state and science, and the abolitional possibilities of collective struggle.

Margaret Marietta Ramírez

MARGARET MARIETTA RAMÍREZ is an Assistant Professor of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby BC V5A 1S6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her work explores the intersections of race, resistance, and urban space, and what the creative practices of people experiencing dispossession can tell us of the underlying racial, colonial, and capitalist structures of cities.

Yolanda González Mendoza

YOLANDA GONZÁLEZ MENDOZA is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250. E-mail [email protected]. Her research program analyzes how processes of colonialism, modernity, bordering, and immigration law have affected agrarian communities in Mexico and Mexican immigrants in the United States, and in turn how immigrants themselves resist by adopting and readopting transborder knowledge to confront barriers and produce meaningful life.

Michelle Daigle

MICHELLE DAIGLE is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies and Geography, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research is largely based in Mushkegowuk territory and examines Indigenous resurgence amid the global conditions of colonial capitalist violence.

Notes

1 Ahahui Mālama I Ka Lōkahi is a nonprofit organization founded by Native Hawaiians devoted to the preservation of Native ecosystems and ecological practices. See http://ahahui.org/.

2 Saathi (from Hindi) means companion, friend, or comrade. Nagar (2019) alternated between the Hindi saathi and co-traveller.

3 Our slower pace and intensive reading of Wynter, Cabnal, and Goeman generated many, many pages of notes (fifty-one, to be exact).

4 In calling these thinkers feminists, we do not wish to subordinate their work into a universalist feminist project. We are also cautious not to conflate their varied understandings of gender and patriarchy. However, as Paquette’s (2020) reading of Wynter suggests, we believe that each scholar’s trenchant critiques of feminism can be held in productive tension with how their ideas inspire liberatory projects that account for gender and sexuality.

5 Abya Yala refers to the Americas in the language of the Kuna Indigenous peoples of Panamá (Speed 2017), although it is worth noting that Cabnal is speaking specifically from the colonial contexts of Guatemala and Bolivia.

6 We focus on three of Wynter’s (1995, 2001, 2003) articles, guided by McKittrick’s annotations and discussions with Wynter (Wynter and McKittrick 2015).

7 “The First and Second Events are the origin of the universe and the explosion of all forms of biological life, respectively” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 25).

8 Wynter’s framework resignifies Africa—problematically framed as primitive in teleological evolutionary narratives—as the origination site of human inventiveness, where the storytelling capacity evolved, and with it, the emergence of cultural practices governing human societies (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 31). We are attentive to the divergence and tensions that could arise between Wynter’s thesis of singular human origin and dispersal, and the plurality of Indigenous origin stories of place and movement. We also recognize, however, openings in bringing Wynter’s thesis into dialogue with Indigenous conceptions of creation, which offer guidance for living in accordance with what Wynter called the “referent-we” of communal and nonhuman relational networks.

9 Echoing decolonial critiques, Wynter recontextualized the European Enlightenment—what Foucault described as the “invention of Man”—as predicated on colonization (da Silva 2015).

10 This binary spatial imaginary, frequently erased in liberal genealogies, is explicated by fascist philosopher Schmitt (2003) in his discussion of the conquest of the Americas as the condition of possibility for international law and the creation of states (Blanco and Del Valle 2014). Reyes (2012) explores how Frantz Fanon used and subverted this Manichean vision of the world.

11 See discussion of skin-lightening and genetic engineering as eugenics (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 19–20).

12 “Gender is a founding member because in order to auto-institute ourselves as subjects of a genre-specific referent-we, we must, first, co-relatedly and performatively enact each such code’s ‘second set of instructions’ at the familial level, in terms of our gender roles” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 33).

13 See Wynter (2003) on the racial-colonial logics underlying Man 1 and the normalization of the state.

14 See C. B. Davies’s (2015, 217) discussion of Wynter’s theory of “indigenization” on extraction as settler performance and humanness as (collective) reinvention in relation to place (cf. C. Smith, Davies, and Gomes 2021 on Beatriz Nascimento’s theorization of quilombo territoriality as becoming).

15 Here, Wynter built on, and inverted, Butler’s (2002) thesis of gender performativity, which describes gender as a performance of socially constructed social norms. For Wynter and McKittrick (2015), gender is a “founding member class” (33) of humanness; not only gender, but all aspects of humanness (race, class, sexuality, ability) that define our behaviors, roles, and expectations, are performances of racial-colonial scripts.

16 Cabnal’s work is primarily published in Spanish. Here we cite a commissioned translation by Elizabeth Mason-Deese of Cabnal’s (2010) essay “Acercamiento a la construcción de la propuesta de pensamiento epistémico de las mujeres indígenas feministas comunitarias de Abya Yala” published by ACSUR: Las Segovias in a collection entitled Feminismos Diversos: El feminismo comunitario.

17 We see resonance here with Argentinian feminist scholar Segato’s concept of low-intensity communal patriarchy (Segato and Monque 2021).

18 Turtle Island is a term used by some Indigenous peoples to refer to the North American continent.

19 Cáceres was an environmental organizer who cofounded the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. Her acceptance speech for the 2015 Goldman Prize can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR1kwx8b0ms.